34 of the panels are brand new 370W glass-glass panels, the remaining 16 are much older (probably a decade old, maybe more) that still work pretty well rated at 265 W each (but probably closer to about 220 or so).
Panels cost about 210/each for the new ones and the old ones were pretty much free. Inverter: the one upstairs is a new one, 500 Euros ('second chance'), three phase 4KW, the one downstairs is a monster, it's 17KW with up to six strings and cost another 500. The panels on the high roof were installed, about 1000 to do the job and the rest I did myself, add another 500 or so in cables, tubing etc. The power bill went from 8500 / year to 3500 / year, and all of that is the remaining gas usage. We're looking into using any surplus in nov/dec/jan/feb to help heat the house to further offset the gas usage but the economics aren't really there yet as far as I can see.
And even in November we are still offsetting about 75% of our electricity usage, which somewhat surprises me, I'd expected far worse.
Dude, teach me. Forget solar panels, if you can explain how you're living on ~1/10th the power of the typical home around here I'd power my house on a hamster wheel.
No, more seriously: we started off by pulling all the breakers and to go 'from scratch', then every time I re-connected a breaker I monitored the increase in power draw. This took a bit of time but after a while we figured out there were a number of really bad consumers: my PC (which had a very high end graphics card in it from a machine learning project a couple of years ago), the NAS (which had 12 bays), an older fridge (though I thought it was quite energy efficient, but this really wasn't the case), a water heater hidden under the kitchen cupboards (that one took forever to track down), some smaller loads but still considerable (a couple of studio monitors, game computer that was on standby when not in use, a large studio mixer, a massive pump for the infloor heat that worked just as well (or even better) with the lowest setting as the one that it was on) and then a large number of really small loads that were always on but rarely needed.
Removing all of those saved us 2/3rds of our power draw, we went from 30 to 35 KWh to around 8 to 10 KWh / day. After that it was relatively easy to get to '0' using solar panels and another batch of them and we were suddenly offsetting our gas usage with surplus electricity (which the power company buys).
No hamsters were harmed in the preparation of this message.
I need to do what you did, though I was thinking about hacking up a clip-on ammeter and some monitoring software to examine the various breaker branches.
The easiest spot is right on the distribution wires, they usually are pretty beefy and that means you don't have to re-hang your meter after every breaker. They're also very well insulated so the chances of shorting something out diminish a lot (but if you do the effects will be far more spectacular ;) ).
In the end I installed a 'Shelly' three phase current meter permanently with the pickups around the mains wires. That gave me very precise logging (and given that the distribution board passes those three wires roughly balanced out across the breakers it is already quite fine grained). It also allows you to spot intermittent consumers and for the money I wished I had installed it earlier during my hunt.
They also suffer from lack of raw-material abundance and shorter lifetimes. But it may be possible to fix both of those too. The factory for perovskite cells should require much less initial investment, what is a huge limitation for silicon cells, so it could be revolutionary.
However, more efficient cells will probably find new uses where space or weight is very limited.
For instance, if small panels had high enough efficiency you’d probably see a lot of people who wouldn’t consider roof installations popping them up on their back decks and the like since it’s far less involved to do so. It’d also help work around rules like the one my HOA imposes, where roof mounted solar can’t be street visible.
Bloody hell, some people just want to watch the world burn.
I feel like if we cared about climate change at all there would be federal (global?) laws with severe penalties making rules like the one above highly illegal.
What is disgrace
For those that don’t have such a list, I recommend you start, otherwise the only opinions they hear are from people paid to capture their attention.
"Look they have solar panels on their roof. There goes the neighbourhood."
For that there are multi junction cells, with 30% readily attainable (at a cost, but still, you can just order them if you need them).
What? This doesn't make any sense. How do we invent new things if economics is all that matters? There's a whole process. You prove a thing is possible (literally the thing happening, nothing else), then move onto making the thing reliably reproducible to demonstrate, THEN optimizing for being cheap. It can fail at any point here (and there are more between tbh). This is a really long process. An example might be NASA's TRL scale.
I mean yeah, it is university press and they hype it up, but I'm pretty sure a big reason for that is because comments like this. Being shitty at something is the first step to being kinda sorta good at that thing. Context matters a lot and the context here is: done by researchers, university research, journal publication. This is not Apple coming out and saying they invented something that's going to be on the market in a few months. This is someone at Apple's research lab being like "Hey, that thing we've been researching? I reached a milestone, we shouldn't call it quits yet."
This is now a mature market and mature markets are governed by economics unless you manage to make a massive step forwards. So if that x% improvement comes with an increase in total cost over installed life > x% it's a non-starter.
But if we're complaining about the hyping of science, then I'm with you. I haven't been shy about my feelings, as someone finishing my PhD, about academia on here.
Has this solved every problem? Obviously not. Not even close. Its still an important research milestone.
I did a pretty big solar installation over the last two years and I decided to go for quality panels because the glass-glass sandwich panels have a much better economic picture than the glass-plastic ones even though they are more expensive up front.